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Breaking Bad Series Finale: A Man Becomes a Legend in 'Felina'

“Felina” brought Breaking Bad to a close in the most perfect way imaginable. It squared each circle. It righted all the wrongs. Everything that had been done was undone. The pieces fit together. The keys were in the car. The car was in the compound. The gun was in the trunk. The cat was in the bag.…

Oct 1, 2013

Miss America and the Indian Beauty Myth

m.huffpost.com

Nina Davuluri made history Sunday night when she became the first Indian-American to be crowned Miss America. Much of the media coverage since has focused on the entirely predictable racist comments tweeted after she won ("OMG Miss America is a terrorist!" -- wow, I didn't see that one coming). Of…

Sep 30, 2013

Observations From a Tipless Restaurant, Part 6: Why Tipping Should (And May) Be Made Illegal | Jay Porter

jayporter.com

This is part 6 of a series detailing what I learned from operating our farm-to-table flagship restaurant, the Linkery, as a “no-tipping” restaurant that instead charged a fixed percentage for service, from 2006 to 2013. We also operated a sister restaurant, El Take It Easy, that followed the…

Sep 30, 2013

Observations From a Tipless Restaurant, Part 5: Sex, Power and Tips | Jay Porter

jayporter.com

This is part 5 of a series detailing what I learned from operating our farm-to-table flagship restaurant, the Linkery, as a “no-tipping” restaurant that instead charged a fixed percentage for service, from 2006 to 2013. We also operated a sister restaurant, El Take It Easy, that followed the…

Sep 30, 2013

Observations From a Tipless Restaurant, Part 4: Return to Tip Country at El Take It Easy | Jay Porter

jayporter.com

This is part 4 of a series detailing what I learned from operating our farm-to-table flagship restaurant, the Linkery, as a “no-tipping” restaurant that instead charged a fixed percentage for service, from 2006 to 2013. We also operated a sister restaurant, El Take It Easy, that followed the…

Sep 30, 2013

Observations From a Tipless Restaurant, Part 3: How Tipping Promotes Bad Service | Jay Porter

jayporter.com

This is part 3 of a series detailing what I learned from operating our farm-to-table flagship restaurant, the Linkery, as a “no-tipping” restaurant that instead charged a fixed percentage for service, from 2006 to 2013. We also operated a sister restaurant, El Take It Easy, that followed the…

Sep 30, 2013

Observations From a Tipless Restaurant, Part 2: Money and the Law | Jay Porter

jayporter.com

This is part 2 of a series detailing what I learned from operating our farm-to-table flagship restaurant, the Linkery, as a “no-tipping” restaurant that instead charged a fixed percentage for service, from 2006 to 2013. We also operated a sister restaurant, El Take It Easy, that followed the…

Sep 30, 2013

Observations From A Tipless Restaurant, Part 1: Overview | Jay Porter

jayporter.com

This is the first of a multi-part series detailing what I learned from operating our farm-to-table flagship restaurant, the Linkery, as a “no-tipping” restaurant that instead charged a fixed percentage for service, from 2006 to 2013. We also operated a sister restaurant, El Take It Easy, that…

Sep 30, 2013

Downtown revitalization secret: Let us drink in public!

salon.com

Parking lots and plots of bare earth line much of Beale Street, on the south side of downtown Memphis. The landscape is a familiar one. Hollowed out by population flight and urban renewal, it recalls parts of downtown Jackson, Cleveland or Tulsa. Cross South Fourth Street, though, and it’s as if…

Sep 30, 2013

BeyondChron: San Francisco's Alternative Online Daily News » How the NFL Fleeces Taxpayers

beyondchron.org

Taxpayers fund the stadiums, antitrust law doesn’t apply to broadcast deals, the league enjoys nonprofit status, and Commissioner Roger Goodell makes $30 million a year. It’s time to stop the public giveaways to America’s richest sports league—and to the feudal lords who own its teams. Last year was…

Sep 30, 2013

Seymour Hersh on Obama, NSA and the 'pathetic' American media

theguardian.com

Seymour Hersh exposed the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam war, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize. Photograph: Wally McNamee/Corbis Seymour Hersh has got some extreme ideas on how to fix journalism – close down the news bureaus of NBC and ABC, sack 90% of editors in publishing and get back to…

Sep 29, 2013

Is Grand Theft Auto V the most relevant story about torture since Zero Dark Thirty? - Quarter to Three

quartertothree.com

Is Grand Theft Auto V the most relevant story about torture since Zero Dark Thirty? Tom Chick , September 21, 2013 | Features The following article is about a mission in Grand Theft Auto V called “By the Book”. It contains spoilers about the game up to that point, but not beyond. The root is still…

Sep 27, 2013

Sample Stories with Bob James « Nah Right

nahright.com

Words by Daniel Isenberg ( @StanIpcus ) Pianist and composer Bob James may very well be the most sampled jazz musician in the history of hip-hop. Pieces of his now famous compositions like “Nautilus” and “Take Me to the Mardi Gras” have been endlessly loaded into MPCs, SP-1200s, and various other…

Sep 26, 2013

DJ Zimmie The End Of DJingDJ Zimmie

djzimmie.com

Sep 5 The End Of DJing The End Of DJing… First off, if you’re reading this on your cell phone and you’re in the middle of a dance floor at a club, say good night to your friends, pay your tab, walk outside and step in front of a bus. The world thanks you. I’ve been meaning to write this article for…

Sep 26, 2013

Long Shot: Inside the Scope of Smart Weapons

motherboard.vice.com

It was high noon. The Tower's 3.5-ton bell chimed out 16 poms , right on cue. By then, the temperature was well into the triple digits. The sun beamed down on locals and university students, faculty, and staff alike, all going about their business and lives. August 1, 1966, was just another Monday…

Sep 25, 2013

Container shipping: the secretive industry crucial to our existence - Telegraph

telegraph.co.uk

Friday. No sensible sailor goes to sea on the day of the Crucifixion, or the journey will be followed by ill will and malice. So here I am on a Friday in June, looking up at a giant ship that will carry me from Felixstowe to Singapore, for five weeks and 9,288 nautical miles through the Pillars of…

Sep 23, 2013

Reuters Investigates - The Child Exchange

reuters.com

Americans use the Internet to abandon children adopted from overseas MOTIVATED MOM: In her time seeking children on the Internet, Nicole Eason has referred to herself as Big Momma and Momma Bear. Her term for informal custody transfers is "non-legalized adoption," and she defines the phrase to mean:…

Sep 23, 2013

Public Enemies: Social Media Is Fueling Gang Wars in Chicago | Underwire | Wired.com

wired.com

Just about any teenager in Chicago today can tell you the story of Chief Keef and Lil JoJo, two rappers from the South Side neighborhood of Englewood whose songs serve as anthems for their rival gangs. Keef, an 18-year-old whose real name is Keith Cozart, is the most successful of the city’s…

Sep 23, 2013

Jane Mayer: How Far Did PBS Go to Avoid Offending a Sponsor?

newyorker.com

Koch, the conservative industrialist, has given $23 million to public television. Illustration by Daniel Hertzberg Last fall, Alex Gibney, a documentary filmmaker who won an Academy Award in 2008 for an exposé of torture at a U.S. military base in Afghanistan, completed a film called “Park Avenue:…

Sep 23, 2013

The Twelve Mile High Tower Is on "Pause" Thanks to the Jet Stream

motherboard.vice.com

Rendering of the Tower, via ASU Last year, one of the world's best science fiction writers teamed up with a respected engineer to build a twelve-and-a-half mile-high tower. For the record, that's 24 times higher than the planet's current tallest building, the Burj Khalifa. It's way taller than…

Sep 22, 2013

In Praise of Slow Design: Observatory: Design Observer

observatory.designobserver.com

Design Observer Observatory Places Change Observer Observer Media Comments (22) Posted 01.15.06 | PERMALINK | PRINT Michael Bierut Cover of the New Yorker , Charles E. Martin, 1946 I got what I wanted for Christmas: The Complete New Yorker , which, as you probably know, is a digital archive of every…

Sep 22, 2013

Francis Ford Coppola takes the same approach to wine and film

thedissolve.com

“One of the most insidious myths in American wine culture is that a wine is good if you like it. Liking a wine has nothing to do with whether it is good. Liking a wine has to do with liking that wine, period.” —Karen MacNeil, The Wine Bible In 1971, as part of preproduction on The Godfather ,…

Sep 20, 2013

How football players make the grade in Madden

joystiq.com

2h AV 'Doom Eternal' doubles the (destructible) demons And that might be just fine. By T. Seppala , 2h ago Save 2h 2h ago in AV ‘Quake Champions’ is free-to-play forever No more waiting until the game fully comes out -- it's F2P now and always. By D. Lumb , 2h ago Save View 3h 3h ago in Gadgetry…

Sep 20, 2013

Machine language: how Siri found its voice

theverge.com

Day confidently rolled in having just given birth to her daughter a mere four days earlier (“VO is fantastic —nobody is going to judge me for wearing maternity clothes!”) She wasn’t prepared for what was about to hit her. Ivona , a Polish text-to-speech company, was creating a computerized voice…

Sep 19, 2013

Grand Theft Auto V's Torture Scene: How Evil Should a Video Game Allow You to Be?

newyorker.com

It was Vladimir Nabokov’s wife, Véra who rescued the manuscript of “Lolita” from a back-yard incinerator at Cornell University. Beset by doubt over the book’s subject matter, Nabokov hoped to burn the novel before it reached the public. Likewise, the American literary critic George Steiner had…

Sep 19, 2013

Why Haven't Lasers Replaced the NFL’s First Down Markers?

motherboard.vice.com

The NFL is a conservative organization, and like most massive sports leagues, it's fairly adverse to change. So an idea like using lasers to project a visible first down line across the playing surface, replacing the lengthy process of bringing out the chains to measure, is going to have to wait a…

Sep 19, 2013

The meticulously constructed film work of David Mamet

thedissolve.com

“The great fucks that you may have had,” a real-estate salesman muses in front of a potential client in David Mamet’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Glengarry Glen Ross. “What do you remember about them? For me, I’m saying, what it is, it’s probably not the orgasm. Some broad’s forearm on your neck.…

Sep 18, 2013

Is Avenues the Best Education Money Can Buy? - NYTimes.com

nytimes.com

In the black-box theater, Avenues’ chief administrative officer helped assure parents that their kids’ diet was sufficiently organic, local and healthful. The regional director of its food-service contractor was on hand to address any fears about carbohydrates. A doctor from Mount Sinai Hospital was…

Sep 15, 2013

Errol Morris on 'The Unknown Known' and Donald Rumsfeld's Snowflakes

motherboard.vice.com

Errol Morris's newest documentary, The Unknown Known, is a 96-minute interview with Machiavellian mouthpiece Donald Rumsfeld, the former secretary of defense who served both under Ford and, most recently, George W. Bush. The film's title comes from Rumsfeld's infamous and obscure gibberish about…

Sep 15, 2013

Roman Polanski Gives Rare Interview, Denies Accusations He Has Lived as a Fugitive

vanityfair.com

Photographs by Julian Broad. In a rare interview, Polish film director Roman Polanski tells Vanity Fair contributor James Fox that the wave of anger and hatred that followed his September 2009 Swiss arrest for the outstanding charge of unlawful sex with a minor was much worse than the reaction to…

Sep 15, 2013

Lost One: Mister Cee and Hip-Hop Radio's Trick

grantland.com

You hate to hear the story, again and again. I don’t care what most people do in their private lives and, insofar as you can feel a way about someone whose only relationship to your immediate life was (1) as a name on an album sleeve, and then (2) a strong reason to eat lunch at your desk, it was…

Sep 15, 2013